Starts With A Bang podcast #117 — Gravitational waves and the Universe | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | May, 2025

Just 10 years ago, humanity had never directly detected a single gravitational wave. We’re closing in on 300 now, with so much more to come!

It might seem hard to fathom, but it hasn’t even been ten full years since advanced LIGO, the gravitational wave observatories that brought us our very first successful direct detection, turned on for the very first time. In the time since, it’s been joined by the Virgo and KAGRA detectors, and humanity is currently closing in on 300 confirmed gravitational wave detection events. What was an unconfirmed prediction of Einstein’s General Relativity for a full century has now become one of the fastest-growing fields in all of astronomy and astrophysics.